It Can Be Good to Disconnect

Sunday, January 28, 2018 / 1:00 PM

In 2017, all I could think about was how burnt out I felt by the news cycle and the endless feed of news that crossed my eyes every day. It's one of the downsides, I suppose, of staring at a computer all day – but even though I've been in this business for 6 years, for some reason, last year just hit me hard.

Last week, I got dinner with a friend, who's in the same industry, and she told me she had deleted social media apps off her phone. She realized her justifications in the past of "needing" to be connected for her job didn't hold up the more she felt herself getting drowned in the news she had spent all day consuming already. As I was listening to her talk about it, I realized I wanted so badly to do the same – except I'm afraid I don't have the same self-control.

But I do think I've been doing this in some form already. Over the past year, I had been making a conscious effort to not look at my phone when I'm with people or doing something like watching TV or reading a book. It can be too tempting to use commercial breaks to stare at Facebook, but what was that really doing for my brain?

Subtweets, FOMO, Twitter spats, unwanted comments... sometimes, when I look at my feeds, I worry that we've all stopped really talking to one another.

Has anyone out there had any luck with a full social media cleanse? It can be hard to this because my job does require me (during the day) to be on all of these platforms, but I'd love to know how others separate their work from personal time, especially in regards to the internet.